Let’s face it: Not a lot of little kids dream of becoming economic-development directors when they grow up.

But in the grown-up world — a competitive world where cities must hustle to find jobs for their residents — economic-development directors have become all but indispensable.

Win a battle, and your town has a little more jingle in its jeans, a little more spring in its step, another timber in the edifice of civic pride.

Lose too often, and a city can slide into mediocrity or decrepitude.

The guy who’s fighting those battles for Mesa has won more than he has lost lately, and he’s in the hunt for even more high-profile companies willing to hang their shingles in Arizona’s third-largest city.

The recent string of successes is pretty much what Bill Jabjiniak expected when he checked in as Mesa’s economic-development director on Oct. 1, 2007.

City Manager Chris Brady picked Jabjiniak for a job that had been vacant for nearly two years. “He has a style and a personality that is very supportive of developing those really strong partnerships,” Brady said at the time.

Jabjiniak was no rookie by then. He was 47, with a resume that included downtown renewal projects in Manchester, N.H., and controversial efforts to build a baseball stadium in Richmond, Va.

Those are towns, it should be noted, that most people have heard of. Jabjiniak didn’t think that was true of Mesa when he arrived, calling it “the best-kept secret 38th-largest city in the country.”

His assignment was to change that — even though his department funding was slashed by 40 percent and he lost a third of his staff in the early days of the recession.

He knew Mesa needed to shake up its whole approach to attracting jobs.

“Changing the paradigm,” he calls it.

“Years ago, this community chased retail because it provided sales-tax dollars,” Jabjiniak said. “But if you change the paradigm now to where you pursue high-value, high-wage jobs, and you’re successful at that, that creates a demand for housing. What follows housing is that demand for retail. Changing that focal point, I think, has been huge.”

On that point, Jabjiniak is singing the same tune as Brady, Mayor Scott Smith and a City Council that has refused to settle for shopping centers on sites that could produce more lucrative job opportunities down the road.

It’s also crucial, he said, to have city department managers and staffers on board.

Staff buy-in played a key role in 2011, when Mesa outhustled out-of-state cities to land the 1.3 million-square-foot First Solar factory, now owned by Apple Inc.

“I remember our engineering staff running a 24-inch sewer line a mile and three quarters in eight or nine months” to accommodate that factory, Jabjiniak said. “That’s a huge feat.”

Further, he said, Mesa issued building permits for First Solar even before the development agreement came up for council approval.

That epitomizes Jabjiniak’s fundamental approach to his job.

“Economic development can be defined in a lot of ways,” he said. “I like to define it as whatever it takes to get a deal done.”

The ability to juggle multiple players has glued together most of the deals he has coordinated for Mesa.

One example was the dicey struggle to keep the Chicago Cubs from moving to Florida.

“The complexities of the early days of Chicago Cubs spring training — back and forth at the state Legislature, what the Cubs need, what we have for financing, sites — all the different options were certainly complex,” he said. “I think that’s fun. That’s what we do.”

Much more work awaits his growing 14-person staff, Jabjiniak said. Opportunity stretches across the city, from Gateway through the Falcon Field and Riverview areas to downtown and the Fiesta District.

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